Forget Serious Crimes, Police Target Teenage Belchers

July 28, 1991|By DENIS HORGAN; Courant Columnist

They sure don't have a lot to do in East Hartford these days. It must be nice.

With all the trifling problems of high crime and overloaded courtrooms, authorities there are able to dedicate months and uncountable dollars in hot pursuit of a couple of teenagers for their towering offense of burping into the telephone. Grim officialdom tapped the phone lines, tracked them down and hauled the belchers before the humbling majesty of the law. Justice is done.

No doubt, if you are the victim of a crime in East Hartford, even one not as serious as being burped at, you can rest comfortably knowing the town dedicates so much energy to bring malefactors to heel. If it happens that they don't catch the crook who stole your property or menaced your well-being, it might only be because their energy was so importantly diverted to the burp patrol.

A pair of teenagers would call a friend and make odd noises into the phone. The annoyed mother of the teen at the other end was not amused and eventually complained to the police. Those worthies assigned an officer to the matter and enlisted the snoopsters at Southern New England Telephone to monitor and tape calls for three months. The offenders were targeted, warrants were issued and the prosecutors hauled the villains to court. The gangsters agreed to perform 35 hours of community service to avoid what surely would have been hard time in maximum security.

Possibly you might wonder why it is that teenagers would burp into the telephone in the first place, but to ask that suggests you don't have a lot of experience with the quirky, otherworldly phenomenon of such creatures.

People who do not have teenagers -- or who are merely trying to make a buck off them, such as the movie makers -- tend to lionize the breed as complex and important voices in the human chorus. They are quite wrong. In fact, teenagers are merely a wrinkle in the evolutionary blueprint, something of a mistake. Often children in adult bodies, just as often near-adults in childrens' bodies and, more often yet, some perplexing combination of both, teenagers bear only passing resemblance to the tots they most recently were or the

adults they hopefully, prayerfully, will soon become.

In teen "brains," addled by the explosions of adolescence and a billion uncertainties, burping at a pal over the telephone could be considered the height of sophisticated humor and elegant dialogue. In fact, all teen things considered, the burp may very well be the most intelligent remark one should expect from a teenager.

If everything must have its purpose, the teenagers' seems to be to exasperate the parent and keep adults off balance and to banish contentment from the home. It is a noble responsibility, and they do it well.

By my own experience, teenagers can be counted upon to eat the family into bankruptcy, outgrow their clothes in a weekend, alternate between hurricanes of gabby jibber-jabber and doldrums of withdrawal so deep that even a belch would be welcomed. This human transition cannot be pleased, and is only inadvertently pleasing.

The teen, so shortly ago a cute little tyke hanging on the parents' every wisdom, now is an obstinate, confrontational, chip-on-the-shoulder eye-roller burdened with the most collosally dumb parents in the history of the, like, world.

Economical, the teen is match and scratch paper, flint and steel, in one. And when the teen takes to driving, you will never know sleep again -- at least until the thump of the car door announces the teen's always-late return. Unpredictable, the teen can be relied upon to never once do what is expected. Feisty, rude, cantankerous, dopey -- all this, while a constant wonder at the same time.

Certainly the mother in East Hartford has rich cause for her anger. Who wants to listen to jerks burping on the phone? Maybe she might have done better to let it be known that she thought it was a riot and she just loved their cutesy-pie behavior -- as nothing infuriates and discombobulates teenagers more than an adult agreeing with them, their whole self-worth resting on being different than adults. But she's entitled.

Why it was, on the other hand, that East Hartford felt compelled to go nuclear over this infraction, with lawyers and prosecutors and police and legal eavesdroppers and tax dollars brought in in abundance, is something else. Maybe there are those in authority in significant ways not far enough advanced beyond teendom themselves to squander their time and resources so. It must be a pretty quiet place that such as this becomes a big deal.